In the next battle that broke out with Iwagakure, Yuji and Sasori felt the difference immediately.
The moment the fighting started, Yuji's rescue work was targeted. An enemy assault squad drove directly at him and Sasori, clearly willing to absorb casualties just to create an opening for their comrades to finish the job.
The moment one of them locked onto him, the shout went up across the Iwagakure line.
Yuji was still carrying an injured Sunagakure ninja on his back, retreating.
"Protect Yuji!"
Sunagakure reacted immediately, moving to intercept, but the assault had been planned around exactly that response. The enemies they stopped were a diversion.
Two Iwagakure experts using the Hiding with Camouflage Technique had already circled wide, coming around to his left and right simultaneously, closing in for a pincer.
The battlefield was too chaotic. Yuji was not a Sensor Ninja. His reaction came half a beat late, and by the time he registered them they were already at close range, a killing move already in motion, and he still had an injured man across his back.
He raised one hand.
Blood droplets already floating in the air around him connected into lines, forming a web of red threads that expanded outward in an instant. The surging lines drove through both Iwagakure ninja before either of them understood what had happened. They dropped without a sound.
Yuji's expression was cold as he looked at them. Then he flickered away with the injured man.
His own sensory ability was the problem. Relying entirely on the five senses for analysis and judgment had limits that a situation like this exposed directly.
The raid had been so fast that he hadn't detected it coming, he had only grown alert from noticing how fixated Iwagakure seemed on him, and set his Blood Manipulation to passive defense on instinct.
Configuring it that way, with the Cursed Womb effect applied, had also pushed his Kekkei Genkai's development forward. But if he had been even slightly slower, the outcome would have been different.
He was grateful Shimizu had warned them.
He glanced toward Sasori's position as he retreated, wondering what they had thrown at him.
The battle ended just over an hour later.
Sunagakure collected its fallen and declared victory. Yuji stood among the aftermath looking exhausted, his ninja uniform torn in several places. The pressure of this engagement had been greater than the first, Iwagakure had made specific deployments against him and Sasori, and he had felt it throughout.
He had killed some of them and resisted the rest, but he had been hit. The injuries weren't severe, and his Medical Ninjutsu could handle what his body couldn't close on its own, but they were there.
He crossed the field to Sasori.
A small area of burns across Sasori's body, manageable, nothing that couldn't be treated. Yuji began working on it immediately.
Sasori glanced at his own wound while Yuji worked, and his expression shifted into something tighter.
"What is it?" Yuji asked.
"I can feel it more and more," Sasori said, meeting his eyes. "This body is a burden to me."
"Whatever you're thinking, it's not the time yet."
Yuji understood what he meant and said it without hesitation. Even setting aside everything else, Sasori's current puppet mastery and technical level didn't support what he was considering.
It would require more time, more development, continuous trial and error, and the research on the puppet core alone was nowhere near finished.
Yuji already knew Sasori had been working on it privately. He had been using corpses from the battlefield as research samples, and over the past weeks he had come to Yuji several times with questions about the relevant techniques.
Yuji had given him suggestions and answers each time, and Sasori had taken them without comment and returned to his work.
When Sasori could perfectly execute everything he envisioned on a sample and ensure nothing could go wrong, then he could try it on himself.
This was Sasori's expression of his Dao of Puppetry, his pursuit of art taken to its logical end. Whatever Yuji thought of where that path led, he could only offer help and respect. That was what a friend did.
Months passed.
The Puppeteer Unit that Yuji and Sasori were attached to compiled a record on the front lines that neither Commander Shimizu nor the village could overlook. In their engagements with Iwagakure, they did not suffer a single defeat.
This was not because Yuji and Sasori had individually become forces capable of deciding battles, they hadn't reached that level yet, and they knew it. What they had done was change the unit around them.
In the beginning they had been targeted constantly, raided in various ways, taking injuries as Iwagakure probed and tested their responses. Gradually they adapted to the intensity of front-line combat, found their footing, and their individual contributions became more consistent and efficient.
Iwagakure even sent assassination squads into the Land of Wind specifically to eliminate the two of them. None of those attempts succeeded.
The sustained winning record came from something broader than their individual performance.
Yuji's medical teaching had spread beyond his own squad almost immediately. His presence on the front raised the professional level of every Medical Ninja in the deployed force within a short time, treatment capability improved across the board, and the number of injured from other squads and battalions who had to be sent back to the village and pulled from the battlefield dropped significantly.
He also recommended that Shimizu contact the village directly, and through the logistics unit, medical tools and equipment he had developed were transferred from the village hospital and put into use across the army.
These improvements accumulated quietly and changed the texture of the entire force.
Sasori worked differently. He had no patience for teaching and made no effort to hide that. But other Puppeteers watched him, in daily life and on the battlefield, and what they saw in his mechanisms, his puppet designs, his manipulation techniques, was enough to make them imitate and adapt on their own.
Occasionally someone would approach him with a specific problem. If it didn't irritate him and the group asking was small enough, he answered. That was the extent of it, and it was enough.
Iwagakure felt the change clearly. They were the only ones positioned to measure it directly, and what they observed was the outcome they had most wanted to prevent.
Their original assessment of the threat Yuji and Sasori posed had been correct, and now, with half a year of battlefield growth behind the two of them and a string of failed plans to show for Iwagakure's efforts, eliminating them cleanly was no longer a realistic option.
In that half year, Yuji was promoted to captain of the medical team, with several Medical Squads under his command. Sasori became Squad Leader of his Puppeteer squad.
Both had built their standing in the army the same way, through demonstrated competence in their respective fields and through performance on the battlefield that left no room for argument.
It was worth noting that although Yuji had acquired ninja tools through the system, he had not actively used them once during this entire period.
He was waiting.
...
PS are appreciated